by Lucas Mann
“It’s ridiculous the way it is now,” Plantier says, like a parent at a PTA meeting. “We go to these countries, we watch these motherfuckers hit one good ball and watch them run fast, and, boom, we give them a million fucking American dollars.”
Tamargo is quiet. He half nods and drinks. He is the son of Cuban immigrants, and both his childhood in Tampa and his life as a ballplayer were bilingual. He is acutely aware that after all his years playing, his major-league career and half century of baseball knowledge, his best professional asset is the fact that his Spanish is fluent and he can tell a Dominican prospect how to shorten his swing without translation. He is kind to foreign players, more than any old-guard guy I’ve come across. Sometimes I hear him make quiet jokes in Spanish that only they can laugh at, small intimacies that are tender and necessary. But he won’t argue with Plantier, maybe because the solidarity is nice, maybe because Plantier was a better baseball player than he was and, even all these years later, that is the most important thing.
The bartender is a young woman with blue eyes and a small mouth whose work shirt is too tight and was probably given to her that way intentionally. She watches us because there’s nobody else to watch. The baseball men call her sweetheart and ask her how old she is. They tell her she’s too slow when she brings things. I wonder if she knows they’re baseball men just by the confidence, the watches, the rings. How many Midwest League vets have been to the Boogaloo Cafe this season, staring at her body and telling her everything that she’s doing wrong?
“JT, how old were you when you made the bigs?” Plantier asks.
“Twenty-two,” Tamargo says. “And I was a catcher, remember. We take a little while. We’ve got a lot of things to learn.”
“I was nineteen,” Plantier says. “Some of these guys here are twenty-three, twenty-four, and they can’t hit A-ball pitching?”
“It’s true,” Tamargo says.
“I got a seventeen-year-old son who could track that eighty-seven-mile-an-hour heater the guy had tonight, and our professional players can’t,” Plantier says and spits. “These aren’t men. You can’t call these men. These are fucking pussies.”
This is the kind of conversation I always fantasized about hearing, even taking part in, though I could never figure out how. Voices hoarse from a lifetime of cigars and yelling commands, guys who’ve been around long enough to pine for better, purer days. But these aren’t wistful words; they are biting and spoken too easily. In Plantier’s nostalgia, there is an equal dose of xenophobia, so I focus my gaze on my fingers ripping apart yet another Budweiser label and try not to make an expression that suggests that I don’t want to be around the great Phil Plantier anymore, that I’m shocked that he wouldn’t care how loud or to whom he said these things, as though he’s not saying anything wrong, as though nobody could think to disagree.
Once, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Phil Plantier was Kalian Sams, the white American version. The better version, too. He was a big swinger who struck out too much, but in the major leagues, not in fucking Iowa. He was worth more. It seems so important to him that I know that, even though everyone already knows. I remember his batting stance, crouched so low he could touch the dirt with his fingers, how especially menacing a player he always seemed because of the torque of such a big body pressed in on itself, waiting to explode. But he is coaching Kalian Sams because he got injured and then he got old and nobody would pay him to play anymore. And, like almost everybody coaching these players, he didn’t plan to spend his life developing others’ talents while forgetting his own.
Phil Plantier probably has no idea who Hank Contreras is. He is paid to make the big investments pan out. He rages in bars about the likes of Sams and the infielders Gabriel Noriega and Mario Martinez because the team went to Venezuela and, in Sams’s case, all the way to Holland and paid them market value. So every time Noriega grounds weakly to second because that body he was paid $800,000 for at sixteen hasn’t filled out by nineteen the way people thought it would, those failures are both Plantier’s job to fix and a slap in his underpaid American face. Hank fits into Plantier’s general scorn, twenty-four, still here in Clinton, on this mediocre team, but he has done nothing to disappoint. He has done nothing.
“When I was in the minors, I knew I’d make it,” Plantier says and finishes his drink. “Everybody knew I would. That was it. This team. You look around and see maybe one guy who has a shot to make it in the bigs. And we’re still paying all these other pussies the bonuses.”
Tamargo changes the subject to something happy, to the happiest thing.
“Man, you had a swing,” he says.
“I had a fucking swing,” Plantier agrees, and then he is finally silent for a moment. I see him stretching his fingers to their full length on the bar in front of him, as though preparing to do something.
“Tamargo,” he says finally. “I’m gonna take a piss. Then, casino.”
The Catfish Bend Casino at the heart of the Pzazz! FunCity is still bright as everything around it closes. I follow them over, but I don’t go in, content to stand at the entrance and squint into the lights, listen to the babble of programmed video poker chatter. Tamargo surveys the room and lights a cigar. He sees some of his players and points at them in mock threat. He sees Dwight, his pitching coach, cowboy hat on, sucking down a cigarette at the blackjack table, looking as if he can’t be real. He smiles.
His team is 21-20, almost as if the season never existed, the same way nearly three decades’ worth of managing has been. He is in the Pzazz! FunCity, and some of the dealers are looking at the shine of his ring. Hank Contreras is upstairs, probably sleeping. In a week and a half, he will play again, go 1-4, but hit the ball hard each time. I will wonder if those four swings were worth it.
I have no money to gamble with, and I leave, begging that young bartender in her too-tight shirt for coffee in a to-go cup as she wipes down her station. I sip and try to sober up in the front seat of my hatchback, parked next to the team bus, the only evidence of the visitors who should theoretically flock to the Pzazz!, its never-ending expanse of fun bigger than everything else in this town other than the ammunitions factory. Gamblers make their way to their cars, all with Iowa plates like mine, most from this county. One woman is on a cell phone hollering, “I won, I won,” and some other people are glaring in her direction because tonight it wasn’t them. But they will be back tomorrow and their time will come and they will win.
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The Collector
HOW MANY PEOPLE COME to a Class A minor-league baseball game? Say it averages out to a thousand. Multiply that by the hundred-plus games a year that Joyce attends at least for a few innings before she has to go to the casino, most at home in Clinton, some on the road at stadiums dotted around four landlocked states. Multiply that by fifteen, twenty years. And how many players? Twenty-five on a team at any given time, the rosters always shuffling, new bodies in old uniforms. The exact sum doesn’t matter. The point is its huge, and that Joyce has seen all these people. She tries to greet them all, give them something, take something from them. She cannot be ignored. If you leave a Clinton LumberKings game early and you turn on 1390 KCLN, you will hear her if you know to listen, a little louder than the rest of the ambient noise, her hollered encouragement as much a part of the nightly soundscape as the bat crack and the commercial for the Clinton County Landfill.
Sometimes, I admit, I slouch in my chair when she yells, letting my shoulder blades dip below the top of stiff, plastic seats, bringing my hat brim to an exclusionary, acute angle, hiding my eyes and my nose, everything but my chin. No matter how many games I spend next to Joyce, I can’t quite shake the self-consciousness I feel when half the stadium hears her and turns to look in our direction. But she, at least, doesn’t seem to judge me for that. She responds not to action or inaction but to care. If you show up, then you care, and if you care, then it is unquestionable that you deserve to belong.
Joyce likes to wait until the
rest of the crowd is silent before she yells—why waste needed energy on a cheer that will get swallowed up in a collective roar? And she yells phrases meant to be distinct. To Vinnie Catricala, the LumberKings’ power-hitting left fielder, she yells, “Go, Cat, go!” a reference to the nickname bestowed upon him by his teammates and a rockabilly song released thirty-three years before his birth. He always hears her, looks over amused or terrified or angry, depending on the kind of game he’s been having. But he always looks. And Joyce waves, and I slide down in my chair. The same goes for Tim “Timber” Morris and Mario “Go, Go, Mario” Martinez and, of course, Nick “Nick Franklin, You’re Hot” Franklin.
Often, we are the only Clinton representatives to make the trip to away games, and so, Joyce says, it is up to us to make the rival fans remember. I pull my little blue Ford in to the lot in Burlington or Cedar Rapids or Davenport or Peoria or Appleton, and Joyce is there before me, always, smoking a Pall Mall, drinking a cherry Pepsi sheathed in a Louie the LumberKing cozy, smiling as she watches my air-conditioning fluid puddle on the hot asphalt beneath the car. She waves.
She’s in her early fifties now, with long, graying hair and thin-rimmed glasses. Her face is round and her body compact, and she shouldn’t be particularly noticeable. I wonder if she knows that. I wonder if she used to be the kind of toned, achingly hot groupie who made summer feel worthwhile. I squirm as I think it, because it is wrong to think. She doesn’t have to have been a sexy stereotype to be allowed a personality here. But sometimes I hope that she was and imagine such a former version, because maybe a lineage of attention would give a clear reason to be at the games, calling out.
Rival fans shuffle past us through the gates. She grins and says, “We’re coming for you.” They squint, see her outline in the sun, denim skirt, oversized Louie the LumberKing T-shirt, Pall Malls, cherry Pepsi, and they recognize her. “Oh, it’s you,” they say, but they say it grinning. She jerks her thumb in their direction as they move away. “You see,” she says, “they know.” I nod.
She told me once about the strike that started in 1979, back when Archer Daniels Midland hadn’t yet bought the corn syrup and ethanol plant and it was still Clinton Corn, back when the town’s population hovered around thirty-five thousand. Joyce’s people came to Clinton for work. Her grandfather and his brothers were Clinton factory laborers, and then her father and her uncles stayed on at the same factory. They came home smelling like something edible but not something you’d want to eat. And Joyce didn’t like the way their hands looked, gnarled. “We are farmers here, basically,” she told me. “Everybody farms something. It’s just a matter of who you’re farming for.”
But that is a reaching, romantic way to put it. Because manufacturing isn’t farming. Of course it isn’t. Yes, the Clinton factory reaps Iowa’s farm crops. Yes, I’ve seen the trucks full of thousands of acres’ worth of harvested corn lining up to sell their wares. And, yes, I see the trains always rumbling out, sending that once-raw Iowa produce to the world. But it’s not easy to think of individual farmers in that equation. Because even the farms that supply the mammoth appetite of ADM are, themselves, mammoth. Sometimes fans talk to me about the family farm that they once had, two hundred acres, self-sufficient. The ones who still farm do so on the side and only because it feels part of how they know themselves. They work full-time at factories to make the farming possible. Families like Joyce’s came to work, never to own.
The strike seemed inconsequential until it resurfaced in so many of our conversations—the year the town became something loud and then quieted into a hush that hasn’t ended. Joyce’s family had lived just blocks from the factory in the neighborhood where most of the old Irish families had always lived and worked, then moved to a little nicer part of town. Everything was familiar, and then it wasn’t. She could walk over and see the factory and the throngs, hundreds of men identical from a distance in jeans and boots and stained T-shirts, holding signs. She could see other men get out of trucks with out-of-state license plates and push through the picket line to take up new jobs. There were hundreds of workers coming, replacing nearly a thousand who had seemingly always been there but were soon to be squeezed out. She couldn’t make out her father. Rocks were thrown; the police came. A few people got the shit beaten out of them, but it was hard to tell by whom. There were gunshots once, ringing out from somewhere in the middle of it all. The smoke rose above the scene, always, never a day when production was stalled.
That was thirty years ago, but it seems as if history stopped then. Or, rather, it seems as if the way things had been, were supposed to be, stopped. It was the beginning of what is now.
Joyce sings the harmony during the national anthem because everyone else sings the melody. That’s how I noticed her first. A hoarse, lilting voice an octave below the rest.
“Who is that?” I asked Betty. Betty gave a warm smile.
“Oh, singing so loud?” she said. “That’s Joyce.”
It was April then, still cold, and I saw her breath as she sang. I’d heard about her before, always from men, never anything nice. On that snowy day in February, my first in town, Ted, the general manager, slugged down a Mountain Dew and said that if I was going to get to know the team, there would be some fans I would get to know, too, right ones and not-so-right ones. Joyce was an ever-present face of the not-so-right, a bitch on wheels and a psycho hellcat all in one breath. Joyce will always be around, he told me. Joyce is always wanting things, he told me.
I first spoke to her on the benches beyond the left-field fence, and I was wary. It was 4:00 p.m., batting practice, and we were the only people in the stadium not in uniform. She sat with eight or ten freshly gathered balls in a ring on the picnic table in front of her. She held one up for me and displayed a frayed bit of red seam dangling off it. She said Vinnie hit that one so hard that it started to unravel itself. She told me I could touch it if I wanted.
“Do you sell these balls?” I asked her.
I liked that she pursed her lips and wrinkled her forehead and looked full-on offended before saying no.
I’d already become annoyed by the kinds of opportunistic fans who elbowed for position above the dugout and then pretended as if they hadn’t. Men, always, with piles of black three-ring binders at the ready and checklists of players’ numbers organized into columns of “worth it” and “not worth it.” I saw them daily, scurrying to snatch up whatever commerce could be taken from a twenty-year-old’s promise, the scavengers of this ecosystem. When a first-round draft pick like Nick “Nick Franklin, You’re Hot” Franklin walked by, I watched them ask him to sign eight identical cards, all of which would go on eBay. When brown-skinned Latinos in uniform walked by, I heard them call out a wrong name and then, when their target didn’t turn around smiling dutifully, mutter about the highfalutin attitude of foreign prospects ruining America’s game.
“Most of them are worthless,” a fat man in a sweat suit told me once as he closed his binder, referring, I think, to both the cardboard rectangles and the men whose faces adorn them. “But some are worth a dollar, some two, and some can be worth a thousand, so you keep coming back.”
No, Joyce shook her head at me. No, that’s not the point.
When batting practice was over, the players trotted through the door in the left-field fence and headed down the path to the clubhouse, spikes clacking on concrete. Joyce cut a diagonal line toward them and intercepted Vinnie. She held up the ball with the frayed stitching, proof of his power—look, look at what you did.
He signed it in looping, practiced cursive, a huge V, a huge C, and then little sine waves in the middle. And his number, 43.
“I’ll be here every game,” Joyce told me after the players were all off-limits inside the clubhouse. “You can come sit with me during batting practice if you like.”
She gave me one of the balls she’d picked from the grass, hit by Nick Franklin. A gift. She showed me the smudge of wood grain where the bat had connected, like a fingerprint.
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Today, we’re in Cedar Rapids, and Joyce is humming along to the pregame music piped from stadium speakers, country songs, all so instructive about how we should be. As she hums, Joyce surveys the players’ numbers on the field. Thirty-three is here and 50 and 43 and 46, good, good, the players she likes still filling their assigned jerseys, no surprises, no covert, nighttime van rides to the airport, robbing her of a chance to say good-bye. And 3 is here, Nick Franklin, the best. Thank God.
But where is 14, Brian Moran, her favorite relief pitcher? She enlists my help, and we look together, running the tips of our fingers along the distant backs of the players, until it becomes impossible to ignore that there is no 14 in green and gray.
“I think he’s gone, Joyce,” I say, and then I regret how flat, how commonplace, I sound.
She finishes her cherry Pepsi with a loud gulp. She begins to nod her head, slowly at first, then progressively faster, building up affirmative steam.
“Good,” she says finally, a hard word to get out. “Good. Good. He deserved to move up. He had such a funky delivery. Do you remember?”
Nostalgia has never been so instant. In this type of fandom, providing unrelenting support and the occasional baked good at the starting point in the trajectory of careers, things end fast. Things move by. If you don’t grip hard to the moments that happened in front of you, if you can’t quantify them, then they’re gone. Brian Moran will never come back to Iowa, barring a major career collapse on his end. His promise will propel him forward, maybe into the major leagues, probably not. Either way, he is no longer flesh here. He is already a story to covet and mold.